This year during CES 2017 I had the opportunity to work with Panasonic in their booth as part of another influencer campaign, similar to last year. In 2016, I focused mostly on the Technics audio hardware--but this year it was all about the Future Tech Lab. Get a preview of the best tech that we found in the Panasonic booth in the video embedded above, and then hit the jump to check out all the products that I was able to learn about during this CES, like the bendable battery, the sports arena of the future, on the fly multilingual language translation, the incredible Lumix GH5, and more!

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Scientists from the Universities of York and Warwick feel that they have found a way to make a virtual reality device that can simulate all five senses. The NAU VR Cocoon is composed of a headset with electronics and computer capability more realistic than any made so far. While most of them that have been made concentrate only on sight and sound, this one adds the other three senses as well.

Professor David Howard said, “Smell will be generated electronically via a new technique being pioneered by a team at Warwick which will deliver a pre-determined smell recipe on-demand. Taste and smell are closely linked but we intend to provide a texture sensation relating to something being in the mouth. Tactile devices will provide touch.”

Having been exposed to Smellavision and simulators that make you feel like you are in space, we are not sure we are ready to take that next step as we find that too much virtual reality can make us nauseous.

Ever wish you could jump into Second Life? Researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) almost can with the StarCave, a third generation virtual reality space. The pentagon-shaped room consists of computers, rear-projection walls, and floor screens, and displays over 68 million pixels. The room supports 20/40 vision when the users wear lightweight, polarized sunglasses. At a cost of about a million dollars, the StarCave works by pointing a wand to go through the 3D images and/or zoom.

Just as Donick Cary got his break on Comedy Central with Lil’ Bush, HBO has paid a 6 figure amount to Douglas Gayeton, aka Molotov Alta, for his Second Life documentary short. The plot of “My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alta” involves a man who “disappeared from his California home” and begins sending video messages from the site. Set to be released in 2008, HBO plans on a total of 7 mini-episodes that use the machinima process based on the virtual world.

In a world of 1s and 0s…are you a zero, or The One? The Matrix exists, at least in the world of Russian designer Alexei Shulgin. He has created goggles that use filters to transform reality into a virtual world. The artist says that they work similar to filters in Photoshop, such as inverted colors and boost coloration. The glasses’ images can be projected on a screen and can work for several hours on one charge. We understand that the gadget really doesn’t do anything, still there is always room for another warped view of the planet.